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Guidance for Festival Wayfinding

Finding your way round large complex festival sites can be challenging - here’s some practical guidance to help increase the effectiveness of festival wayfinding.
Night-time view across a festival camping site towards the main arena

Over the summer members of The Velvet Principle team spent a couple of long weekends working as volunteer stewards at two festivals. Our roles primarily involved checking wrist bands at different entry points; or roaming the arena and campsites – answering queries and generally being ears and eyes to ensure that all festival goers had a safe and enjoyable experience.  Perhaps unsurprisingly most of the queries were wayfinding related.

Festival Wayfinding Challenges

We fully appreciate the challenges faced by festival organisers when it comes to providing information to help customers navigate site:

  • The sites particularly if providing camping can be quite extensive.
  • They also have a very short time in which to build and take it down.
  • With many different offers and traders all competing for attention, festivals are visually noisy environments. Making it difficult for information to cut through.
  • To keep festival goers safe, wherever possible pedestrians need to be kept away from vehicles traffic which can result in some convoluted routes.
  • As well as the cost, physical signage that it is discarded at the end of the festival could impact on the sustainability ambitions of the festival.

Key Observations and Opportunities

When it’s your day job you can’t help but assess the effectiveness of the wayfinding information you meet away from the office.  Although there is no substitute for a carefully considered strategy, created by an experienced wayfinding professional, below are some key things for festival organisers to consider:

  1. Ensure consistency in the nomenclature given to different facilities or areas. At one festival, there seemed to be three different references associated with each camping area.
  2. When translating a map designed for a large format sign to a handheld printed booklet or App, check that icons/pictograms used to identify key facilities are clearly visible at this smaller scale – particularly in low light conditions.
  3. Use high level large signs, visible in views across the site to identify key facilities/services (e.g. toilets, water stations, first-aid & welfare, lost property, phone charging). Pairing these with identification signs at a more human scale at the entrances/gateways.
  4. To help cut through the competing visual noise, apply a common design style across all festival wayfinding signs. This should reflect the design approach used on other visitor touchpoints and brand communication e.g. promotional material, website, tickets, wristbands etc.

Taking it to the Next Level

The above covers opportunities for improving the effectiveness of what one or both organisers were already providing. But if you really want to deliver a high level of customer service and maximise the festival experience a more strategic approach is recommended

  1. Starting with developing a comprehensive list of key facilities and services. This should encompass all amenities, services, offers and key destinations (e.g. toilets, showers, water stations, accessibility platforms, welfare, first aid, security, lost property, phone charging services, silent disco headphone pick points, waste disposal points, as well as stages/arenas, different campsites; exits, transport pick up points, car parks). Essentially everything a festival goer might need to know for the duration of their stay, starting with arrival through to departure.
  2. Establish a hierarchy to enable the information to be communicated in a way that is manageable and accessible.
  3. Explore routes across site between key destinations to identify decision points where interventions are needed to assist visitor journeys and or reassure them that they are going the right way.


While some of these interventions may involve installing signage thereby adding to costs, there are a range of other tools that could be used to assist with navigation – such as lighting, defined pathways/fencing and landmarks. However, a considered, future-proofed design and robust material selection, could enable the signs to be reused again and again.